Oh, totally agreed. My point is that an RPG about the year 2000 couldn't work as "Hard SF" if in one place they said aluminum was ubiquitous, and in another they said it was so valuable that you could trade a kilo of aluminum for a starship. :)

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 7:03 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <xxxxxx@thepaw.org> wrote:
On 10/25/2015 9:48 PM, Craig Berry wrote:
Yes, but 1850s science and engineering still work. We sent humans to the Moon using 17th-century physics; on the scales involved, Newton is close enough.

I have no trouble at all with science and tech that go completely beyond anything we know, "Hardness", for me, is about consistency of extrapolation. Just for example, high-endurance, high-g reactionless drives are not consistent with physics as we understand them, but they help move stories along so I'm happy to have them. But once you let them in, you have to explain why 0.9c lifeboats aren't an existential threat to every populated world in the Imperium.

Grav-focused lasers are another great example. If you do the math, you quickly realize that the coherent traveling gravitic anomaly you need to "herd" the light is itself vastly more dangerous than the light itself. So why isn't everyone using grav weapons (and calling them that)?

 Perhaps going back to CT or MT and ditching all the "hard science" attempts to quantify things using what we know today would be the best route?

While what we know in 1850 still works, in 1850 we didn't know what we know today nor did we even conceive of the concepts or developments across the board that would make things practical.  You couldn't even refine aluminum for a reasonable price and what you did refine was more valuable than gold...and yet now it's ubiquitous throughout our daily lives.

I guess the crux of my argument is that just because we can't do it today, there's no reason why given another couple thousand years and trillions of minds throughout those years working on the problems that an answer can't be found.  I mean, this isn't like trying to find the right answer when the wife asks, "do these jeans make my ass look fat?"  ;-)


--
Kurt Feltenberger
xxxxxx@thepaw.org/xxxxxx@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@travellercentral.com
To unsubscribe from this list please goto http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=PltOdItWBSgOP4y0Q6abkGbDI1eus0lz



--
Craig Berry (http://google.com/+CraigBerry)
"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake